Obama Team Takes Two Shapes

Gerald F. Seib, executive Washington editor of The Wall Street Journal, has been involved in covering every presidential election since 1980 and writes the weekly Capital Journal column for the Journal. Click here for Mr. Seib’s full bio.

It was said during the Bill Clinton era that the country was getting two presidents for the price of one: President Clinton and first lady Hillary as well.

The Obama transition is putting a new twist on that idea. The president-elect is giving the country two administrations for the price of one.

The first, composed of Mr. Obama’s initial wave of high-profile appointees, is full of familiar Washington veterans. This is the team that pleased moderates and even some Republicans, reassured financial markets — and made the party’s liberals complain about “retreads” and wonder what all that change rhetoric was about.

The second wave of appointments, most coming in the past week or so, is composed of lesser-known names, new faces and, all told, the kind of folks who look like the fabled “agents of change” promised in the campaign.

Just about everybody knew the names in the first wave: Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Paul Volcker and Lawrence Summers. But how many people knew before this month the names Arne Duncan of Chicago, Steven Chu of Berkeley and Lisa Jackson of Trenton? They are, respectively, Mr. Obama’s designated education secretary, energy secretary and Environmental Protection Agency administrator.

It’s no coincidence the rollout of the new administration worked out this way, Obama aides say. The old faces are grouped in the economics and national-security camps, an effort by Mr. Obama to send reassuring signals at a time of war and economic upheaval. The message to markets and the world: no on-the-job training in those areas amid crisis.

The new faces, by contrast, are most notable in the areas of energy and the environment. The signal there: Big changes are coming — or at least being sought — on America’s energy profile and its approach to climate change.

This mix of old and new, representatives of continuity and agents of change, is in keeping with the No Drama Obama style, which eschews jerky motions to one side or the other. It also has brought forth a team that is difficult to pigeon-hole ideologically, just as the candidate was. It screams the word increasingly attached to the president-elect himself: pragmatic.

Of course, the roster isn’t quite complete. Mr. Obama Thursday named former Securities and Exchange Commission member Mary Schapiro to head the commission. He is expected to pick retiring Republican Rep. Ray LaHood of Illinois to be transportation secretary and California Democratic Rep. Hilda Solis to be his labor secretary. Two sensitive national-security posts — director of national intelligence and head of the Central Intelligence Agency — remain unfilled.

The other remaining big position, U.S. trade representative, hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. Mr. Obama plans to name former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, a free-trade advocate, to the post. Mr. Kirk will assume the task of preventing Democrats from drifting too far away from their open-trade stance of recent years and will have to sort out the decidedly mixed messages the party sent on trade during the campaign.

The Obama team that’s taking shape is hardly going to please everyone. Despite a lot of talk of bipartisanship, it isn’t terribly bipartisan; it has just two Republicans, Mr. LaHood and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is remaining in place, and who is as much an independent as a partisan. The South is under-represented. Liberals still have an uneasy feeling they are under-represented.

But the most striking characteristic of the emerging cast of characters is this mix of old and new faces. What the two camps have in common is a general lack of obvious ideological fervor.

Ms. Jackson, for example, is a Princeton-educated chemical engineer who worked previously in the EPA, the agency she is now to head, later ran New Jersey’s main environmental regulator, then became chief of staff for Gov. Jon Corzine. She fits the mold of other Corzine appointees, known more as technocrats than ideologues. In fact, though she’s clearly a Democrat, her choice was opposed by some in the Democrat-friendly environmental community in her state.

“Lisa and fellow, fairly nonpolitical, professional selections of Corzine were sometimes called ‘sensi-crats,’ as in sensible Democrats,” says Jim McQueeny, a veteran New Jersey political analyst. “Others called them ‘neutra-crats,’ which some said meant neutral politically, and others, less kindly, said referred to the fact they were politically neutered.”

The real prototype of Obama appointees, though, may be Mr. Duncan, the Chicago schools chief who is to become education secretary. A Harvard graduate, onetime professional basketball player in Australia, and friend of the president-to-be, Mr. Duncan has managed to build a reputation as a school reformer without winning the enmity of the teachers unions that often resist school reforms.

How did he do that? “He’s a little bit of a Rorschach figure; you can read into him what you want,” says Chester Finn, a conservative education expert who served in the Reagan education department yet praises the Duncan selection. He calls Mr. Duncan a “rounded-edges kind of guy” who has “closed some schools but hasn’t had mass layoffs” among teachers. “He’s a pragmatist, I guess,” Mr. Finn concludes. At this point, at least, that seems an apt description of much of the emerging Team Obama.

Somebody said kool-aid; that's another drink, everybody.
*
Obama is being deliberate but firm in his selections, leaving not much of an ideological fingerprint - in contrast to Bush, who sent up an ideological mushroom cloud. Obama is working it, and working it right, so far.

10:44 am December 19, 2008

Anonymous wrote :

Seib certainly loves his Kool-Aid

About Capital Journal

Capital Journal is WSJ.com’s unique site for analysis of the political and policy maneuvering in Washington in the era of Barack Obama. It features the Capital Journal columns and occasional other postings by executive Washington editor Gerald F. Seib, and will house Political Wisdom, the Journal’s daily aggregation of the smartest political analysis from around the Internet. Also look for regular columns by Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and occasional contributions from others.